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Key Words
race, social movements, color blindness, globalization, antiracism
Abstract
Over the past several decades, global manifestations of racism have undergone significant transformations. The anticolonial struggle, the civil rights movement, and the antiapartheid offensive have challenged the former established racial regimes. But the consolidation of global capitalism has also created new forms of racialization. A variety of antiracist strategies and interventions have emerged to confront new racisms. Analyses of racism have sought to interrogate its history and contemporary manifestations, how it is maintained and reproduced, and to predict its future. Anthropologists and other social scientists are challenged to develop theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to advance our understanding of these new manifestations of race and racism.
INTRODUCTION
Over six decades ago, Gunnar Myrdal described racism as "an American dilemma" stemming from the contradiction between the U.S. ideology of equality and its practices of racial segregation and discrimination. A half century later, this dilemma echoed profoundly at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Other Forms of Intolerance convened in August, 2001, Durban, South Africa, where representatives of the racialized global south sought to renegotiate their unequal relationship with the states of Europe and the Americas. The conference and its accompanying meeting of nongovernmental organizations was attended by more than 8000 representatives and delegates from over 160 countries. The delegates included not only African-descended and indigenous peoples from all over the globe, but also the Dalits from the Indian subcontinent, the Burakumin of Japan, the Roma of Europe, and Palestinians from the Middle East.
Racism is a widely used concept, both by academics and the broader public. However, it is a relatively recent term, corning into common use during World War II (see Fredrickson 2002). In the American historical literature, two distinct perspectives about the source of racism materialized. The "natural racism thesis" (see Allen 2002) generally conceptualized racism as a set of psychosocial orientations, prejudices, and beliefs, linked to in-group/out-group phenomena, the source of which is human nature, considered to be innate, natural, or primordial.1 The more persuasive perspective links racism to structures of power that emerge through processes of accumulation and dispossession within local and transnational contexts. This approach appears in the writings of such social theorists as Eric...